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Recipe ideas

Hello! I was hoping you might be able to give me some inspiration... I have never been particularly adventurous when it comes to cooking but I am hoping to try some new, fairly simple dinner ideas and need some help to get started! If anyone could suggest some quick (I have a five month old baby!), fairly easy recipe ideas or suggest a good cookbook, that would be great!
Thank you in advance!
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Welcome to the cookery forum goonergirl, I hope you'll hang around for a while and share your cooking experiences with us.
There'll be lots of suggestions coming your way, but as lapin asks, what sort of things would you normally choose to eat? Are you a carnevore or vegetarian? Can you give us a rough idea of your weekly food budget and how many in your family to feed from it?

Thank you for the warm welcome! Sorry that my post was not very useful! We are meat eaters and there is just me and my husband who eat the meals (however, my beautiful daughter is four and a half months so may start sampling some in a few weeks!). I have an oven, four ring hob and microwave. We usually eat things like spaghetti bolagnese, pork strogonoff, chilli, chops with veg and potatoes, marinated salmon, fish cakes etc. I try to make things from scratch but sometimes have ready made lasagne and the like! Budget-wise, I have just gone onto SMP so we will probably cut down a bit but usually we do a 'big' shop at the beginning of the month for about &pound;200 and then stock up on fresh fruit and veg from the greengrocer I buy the best meat we can afford but it is usually mince, chicken and pork, rather than steak! Hope that has been more helpful!
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I can't believe nobody's responded so far to this plea for recipe inspiration...
From your budget, gooergirl, I would say you have a similar spend and family size to me, albeit I have a dog instead of a baby. It's enough to live well on but not enough to allow expensive cuts of meat. You have to make the most of the food you buy. You also have similar cooking facilities to me as well.
I tend to choose larger packs of meat when they are on offer and split them into smaller quantities I can freeze these days, now that meat is so expensive and we are becoming more concerned about food waste.
This week I bought a chicken, but instead of roasting it whole, I removed one side of the breast and the legs. It doesn't look anything like as pretty, but it will give us 3 more meals this way.
So we had roast chicken the day before last with all the usual stuff. I suspect I cook it pretty much the same way as everyone else, but I take the trouble to make a spicy and fruity stuffing when I roast chicken as it can at times be pretty bland. Typically, the stuffing consists of a couple of slices of wholemeal breadcrumbs, (if you don't have a food processor just cut it into small pieces, Some times I toast it beforehand to add more flavour) some onion, garlic, chilli herbs and dried fruit, whatever I have available and an egg to bind it together. It always works well. I omitted to say I sweat the onion and garlic down beforehand. Mrs modelmaker can't take much chilli, but then she never eats any stuffing so I add as much as I like. If I have some, I'll add a bit of chopped liver too. To my mind, the stuffing is one of the best parts of a roast chicken dinner these days. Whatever you do, don't think it will be anything like as good if you cook it outside the chicken. It absorbs the chicken juices as it cooks.
I used the breast yesterday in a blanquette of chicken. It's peasant food but absolutely delicious. To do this, I first made stock from the carcass and when well underway, I cut up the breast, popped it in a colandar that I sat over the boiling stock to steam. Next, I sweated down an onion, a carrot, a stick of cerery a chopped clove of garlic on top of all this so it didn't burn. Once the onion was soft I added as many mushrooms I felt necessary, the juice of half a lemon, a glass of white wine, some thyme and parsley salt and pepper and cooked through till the carrot was done. I added the chicken and a ladleful of the stock, let it reduce a little, then added some cream, (about half a carton) and a whisked egg yolk to thicken the sauce. Served it with rice and a hunk of bread.
Once I'd drained the stock, I salvaged any scraps of meat of the bones to add to the dog's dinner and made a chicken, rice and mushroom soup for another day. In this I also have onion, carrot, celery and potato. There was still plenty of chicken scraps left over from the roast part.
The legs are in the freezer awaiting a caserole I'll make day.

I can't believe nobody's responded so far to this plea for recipe inspiration...

Click to expand...

With respect to both you and goonergirl, it might be because the plea is still a little vague*. The successful recipe request posts are often specific - eg. a particular ingredient (such as orzo) or method (such as slow-cooking), or with a theme (budget recipes etc.).
I personally find it a bit hard to think of things to post when a request for recipes is just a very general "recipe ideas". I could post recipes for what I've eaten this week,or for the first things that pop into my head but they may well be recipes that the poster knows how to cook, and as such it's not good use of my time or theirs for me to post it.

Goonergirl - I think best might be to think of an average ingredient you might have in your shopping basket and then post on that basis. Ideas for mince maybe, or what to do differently with a couple of pork chops other than to grill them. Or to trawl through the threads and see the delights that are already on here. If something looks appealing and there's no recipe for it, most forum users are only to happy to provide more information.
Good luck and enjoy the forum.

I would suggest looking at the stew threads. You don't need expensive meat in a stew because you are going to cook it slowly. Make up enough for 8 and then you can freeze some.
Do you have a freezer? That is how I cook cheaply and keep things varied. There are threads about things to cook and freeze which are full of ideas. They may not have the recipes in but you could use them to ask for more suggestions.

Welcome in Goonergirl. But you have certainly presented us with a problem!
You see, we are so stuffed full of good ideas they tend to get jammed in the rush when we are presented with a wide open door!
Ask about an ingredient, style or method of cooking and you will be inundated with suggestions, links to previous threads, websites, etc.
I can't even suggest a book (and I own hundreds of cookery books) cos I don't know enough about how you like ot cook and eat - yes, we are VERY nosy about peoples current cooking habits
And don't get Beth started on slowcookers!

Hi there - as you have a little one that you will want to wean soon (ish), have you heard/read about baby led weaning? It's basically skipping the puree mush stage and going straight on with finger foods at 6 months. The bonus is that you just give the baby some of what you are having. Ideally you all sit together and share meal times, but for us, hubby gets in after our girl has gone to bed so that's not so practical. We often find we can save her a portion of our dinner and she'll eat it the next night. Sometimes there's even enough to freeze a few extra portions.
Quiche is quite nice, we've done lamb tangine, curries, salmon and broccoli pasta bake,...oh and there's a baby led weaning cookbook (find it on amazon!).
Hope that's a bit of help... (we did puree for about 2 weeks because we started on solids at 5 months or there abouts. We gave LO pureed broccoli and a stick, pureed mango and a stick... each time she'd choose the solid sticks over the mush!)

Allow about 50-75g of mince for each burger.
To stretch bacon, take the rind off or use rindless streaky, use a heavy knife. Lay the rasher on a chopping board and using the back of the knife ie the thick part of the blade, press down firmly at an angle and stretch away from you.

Turkey burgers, add grated lemon rind, chopped parsley, salt and pepper, form into burgers then wrap each one in a raher of stretched streaky bacon. Nice with oven wedges and carrot batons.
Steak and cheese burgers, there are 2 ways of doing these, 1 is to make two very thin burgers, sandwich a nugget of blue cheese in between and seal edges,
The other, mix grated cheese with steak mince.
Steak hach&eacute;, mix crushed garkic s&p and I like chopped parsley in mone.
Pork and Apple burgers, minced pork with apple puree
pork with sage and onion. minced pork with some home made sage and onion
Lamb burgers, well I would use my kofta recipe, but lamb with mint jelly works well.